This paper explores the energy and delay issues that occur when some or all of
the local storage is moved out of the embedded device, and into a remote network
server. We demonstrate using the network to access remote storage in lieu of
local DRAM results in significant power savings. Mobile applications continually
demand additional memory, with traditional designs increasing DRAM to address
this problem. Modern devices also incorporate low-power network links to support
connected ubiquitous environments. Engineers then attempt to minimize
utilization of the network due to its perceived large power consumption. This
perception is misleading. For 1KB application "pages", network memory is more
power efficient than one 2MB DRAM part when the mean time between page transfers
exceeds 0.69s. During each transfer the application delay to the user is only
16ms.